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Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Leaping into the Year

Just noticed that February has almost slipped by and I don’t have a blog post for the month.So I figured I’d better get something whipped up, and what better day to do it on than that most elusive of rare days, February 29th.

So, first, an update, I guess.Work on my novel “Behavior” started in mid January, and progress was good out of the gate.I got about 20,000 words of background material, world building and whatnot written, but then I hit a wall, and things have been slow going.I think there are two reasons for that.First, I’ve exhausted all the ideas that had been floating around in my head about the futuristic society in which the novel takes place (it is currently set in 2064), and I guess I need time for new ones to fill it.I’m also used to doing invention work on the fly, as I write the story itself, so I may just have to dig in and start the narrative, so that I can see what corners of my world need to be created and fleshed out, even if I have to revise significantly later.

The second thing that has slowed me up is I’ve gotten back into filmmaking in a minor way.I was heavily into this several years ago, but pretty much got out of it to focus on my prose writing.But I have a friend who I worked on a pilot for two years ago, and he is starting production on more episodes, and asked if I would come back to help with production.I agreed, as I enjoy filmmaking, (I’m currently working as First Assistant Director on the shoot, as well as doing a bit of writing on the scripts) and figured it would be a nice change of pace.But like anything, it takes a lot of time, and in the last two weeks I’ve been working on it, I’ve made little progress on my novel, or any other prose writing.So I’m going to have to see if I can get my head back into the game, and make the novel priority number one, or else bow out of the film project at some point in the future.We shall see.

On the publication front, I’ve had a few sales since the beginning of the year, and a couple of stories have come out as well.Every Day Fiction just bought “Way to Blue,” my story of a winged man who can no longer fly, inspired by the Nick Drake songs “Fly” and the eponymous “Way to Blue.”Used Gravitons released “Rememories” in January.This story, about a disfigured man who visits ‘mem joints’ to relive his former life in his head over and over again, got ripped to shreds by a professional author at Odyssey, but I made a few changes (though probably not as many as he suggested) and I’m happy with it.Sometimes you just have to let a story get out there and see what the world thinks.Finally “The Ale Wife,” a story about a farcical courtship with unexpected results, will be published by Mirror Dance in March.

My wife and I watched the Woody Allen film Midnight In Paris last weekend, and we quite enjoyed it.The fact that it featured some of the “Lost Generation” writers as characters really made me want to reread some of these authors.Hemingway, Fitzgerald and some of the others were heroes to me during college, when I read pretty much their entire oeuvre.The film also brought the romance...the ideal...the fanciful dream of the writer’s life back to my mind.The day to day life of a writer in reality can be pretty banal, though satisfying.Sometimes one has to let one’s mind wander a bit, and look at things from a distant place, to realize that the romance, the ideal, and the dream are indeed there, just as they were for Ernest, and F. Scott, and Gertrude, and all the rest.